Mobile terminals such as cell phones, smart phones, etc. are being developed with the increased capabilities for providing various services and functionalities which are user-friendly. Among the functions, the mobile terminals include an address book and an associated application for managing the address book. The address book generally stores therein a list of contacts and information association with each contact such as the contact's e-mails, phone numbers, addresses. However, there are still limitations associated with the manner in which the address books in the mobile terminals operate in the conventional mobile terminals.
For instance, in the address books of the conventional mobile terminals, the contact entries (address book entries) need to be created and deleted manually by the users of the mobile terminals. For example, if a new contact/person calls a particular mobile terminal, then the user of the particular mobile terminal has to select certain buttons or menu items to have the new person's phone number entered into the address book of the mobile terminal. Similarly, the user must manually operate certain buttons or menu items to remove a contact entry from the address book of the mobile terminal. These operations can be rather time consuming and tedious tasks for the users of the mobile terminals to perform.
Further, since the address book entries (e.g., additions, deletions, and modifications of contact entries) must all be managed manually by the user, as time goes by, the address book can easily grow into a large size too big to be reviewed and managed by the user manually. As a result, the address book often ends up containing many contact entries that are no longer useful to the user or no longer current to be used. To avoid this situation, the user has to review all the entries in the address book and delete or revise the entries as needed, on a regular basis, which is inconvenient.
Furthermore, because the user has to decide whether or not certain contact entries should be created, it puts burden on the user to make this decision each time the mobile terminal is used, e.g., when there is a new incoming call. As a result, many contacts some of which may be relevant may not be added to the address book, or too many contacts some of which are not relevant at all may be added to the address book by the user, because the user does not want to perform or does not actually perform the detailed management of the address book.
Moreover, the conventional address books in the mobile terminals show all contact entries to the users even though some contact entries may be useful only in certain situations or specific contexts such as time and place. As such, the user may need to review and scroll through a large list of contact entries to select a desired one, which is inefficient and time consuming to the user.